


the pebble said to the mountain

by ncfan



Category: Naruto
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Developing Relationship, Families of Choice, Food, Gen, Mentor/Protégé, Pre-Canon, Team as Family, Trauma, Triggers, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 13:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7363531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life in Ame no Kuni was never going to be peaceful, or idyllic, no matter how normal Jiraiya tried to make their lives there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the pebble said to the mountain

**Author's Note:**

> It just occurred to me that I finished a (sort-of) birthday fic for Yahiko and Konan on my own birthday. Weird coincidence.
> 
> [CN/TW: References to the Narutoverse’s complete lack of understanding of and sensitivity towards PTSD sufferers; brief mention of human trafficking (both the in-universe trade in people possessing unique abilities, and your, umm, more mundane human trafficking); references to war crimes]

Jiraiya had had students before. Genius like his had to be _shared_ , after all; he couldn’t just keep it all locked away. Think of what the world would be missing if he _didn’t_ teach his tricks to the younger generations!

Minato had done well, to the point that Jiraiya felt more than comfortable leaving him on his own for a while. The kid _was_ a chunin, after all; he ought to be doing some self-study, some innovation of his own, and he’d do better if he wasn’t constantly looking to Jiraiya for approval. All students had to strike out on their own eventually. It was the way of the world.

But these three kids, Yahiko and Nagato and Konan, these kids who had so boldly approached three enemy shinobi for food, they weren’t like a genin cell a jonin would be assigned in Konoha. Under most circumstances, genin had homes to return to when missions were completed and training was done for the day. Even Minato, who’d had no family left by the time he graduated from the Academy, had been taken in by friends of his parents. Most genin didn’t rely on their senseis for even the most basic necessities to survive.

This wasn’t Konoha, though, and Yahiko, Nagato and Konan weren’t Leaf genin. Jiraiya had had to remind himself of that on a nearly daily basis in the several months since he had started training them. He remembered it when he had to teach them techniques any genin would have learned in their village’s Academy—Jiraiya had no idea how long they’d had to survive on their own, and doubtless their experiences had made them into tough kids, but they couldn’t learn to channel chakra and use it just by watching shinobi fight. He remembered it when he went out and caught or bought food for them, when he bought clothes for them to wear while training, when he woke up in the middle of the night and heard one of them crying.

So towards the end of November, when the rain had turned to sleet and the puddles were slick with thin, brittle sheets of ice, Jiraiya gathered Nagato, Yahiko and Konan around the kitchen table in the abandoned shack they’d taken up residence in.

“Okay, kids, we’ve been living together for a while now. We’re friends, right?”

Nagato nodded silently, and Konan murmured assent. Yahiko raised an eyebrow. “Of course we’re friends, Sensei, Why’d you even have to ask?”

Jiraiya reached across the table and ruffled the boy’s unruly orange hair. “I’m getting to that, Yahiko; hold your horses and listen. Now, we’re friends, and friends celebrate with friends, right?” This got him three nodding heads, and Jiraiya nodded back, smiling slightly. “And friends celebrate birthdays with their friends, right?”

“What’s your birthday, Jiraiya-sensei?” Nagato piped up unexpectedly, staring curiously at him with his one visible eye. His Rinnegan gleamed slightly under the bright golden lamp light, its lavender color vivid for how Nagato’s skin was washed out to white under the same light.

“Never you mind that.”

“But we want to know!” Konan chimed in earnestly. “How can we celebrate your birthday if we don’t know when it is?”

Jiraiya had almost forgotten just how easily kids could derail conversations from their intended destination. He clapped his hand to his forehead and let a disbelieving laugh pass his lips. “I’m not talking about _my_ birthday, you knuckleheads! I’m talking about yours!”

There was a long moment of silence, the air buzzing between them, the rain pattering on the roof almost as if in anticipation. Then, came the explosion.

“Really?!”

“I haven’t celebrated my birthday in years!”

“This is great! Thank you, Sensei!”

Jiraiya’s smile widened, though he was afraid that what he had to say next might dampen their spirits a bit. “I’m glad you think it’s a good idea. Now, look,” he said firmly, meeting all of their eyes in turn. “I can’t really get you normal gifts—we have to conserve our money, and if we ever have to pick up and move, the less we’ve got to carry, the better.” They nodded, and Jiraiya reminded himself (again) that all three of them had been homeless for who even know how long. They knew the ‘accumulate only as much stuff as you can carry’ rule without having to be told. “But if you’ve got a favorite food, I bet I could cook it for you."

Konan, Nagato and Yahiko all looked at one another, considering. Then, Konan, their apparent spokesperson this time, nodded and said, “That sounds nice.” She shut her eyes and smiled widely, exposing small teeth and a couple of gaps where her baby teeth had fallen out. “It’s been forever since I last had any of my favorite foods.”

“Me too,” Yahiko agreed.

Nagato picked at the hem of his sleeve, but Jiraiya got the impression that he was of the same mind as them.

“So, when are your birthdays?” Jiraiya pulled out a small notebook and pen from his pocket. “Let’s start there.”

“February 20,” Yahiko replied promptly, and Jiraiya jotted the date down.

“February 20,” Konan told him, and Jiraiya raised a bemused eyebrow, but took that down as well.

“September 19,” Nagato said, his voice quite but clear.

The final date taken down, Jiraiya commented, “Well, Nagato, it looks like we’ve already missed your birthday this year—sorry.”

“I don’t mind.”

“There’s always next year, anyways. Yahiko and Konan: you two _really_ have the same birthday?” Jiraiya asked them skeptically. Sure, he’d known teammates who had the same birthday, or parents with the same names or other things like that, but he wouldn’t have expected two kids who’d met randomly in a war-torn land to have the same birthday.

But Konan nodded and Yahiko said almost challengingly, “What’s _wrong_ with having the same birthday?”

“Nothing, kid, cool it. Now, out of curiosity, how old are you all turning next year?”

“Eleven,” all three of the children answered as one.

Jiraiya paused, frowning. _Eleven, huh? That means they were all ten when I met them, except for Nagato, and even his birthday wasn’t that far off._ They were older than he’d thought they were; Jiraiya had pegged the three of them as all being around seven or eight when he first met them. That was what malnutrition would do to children, he supposed: leave them smaller for their age than they ought to have been. Especially Konan—she was nearly due for a growth spurt, and most girls her age in Konoha had a good three or four inches on her.

 _I guess the only thing I can do is make sure they get plenty to eat from now on._ Jiraiya tapped his pen against the table, which made Konan wince in apparent chagrin, though he couldn’t imagine why. “Konan, Yahiko, your birthdays are closer, so why don’t you tell your favorite foods first?”

“Gulab jamun,” Yahiko told him, grinning in anticipation.

“My favorite is kabuli pulao,” Konan added.

Clearly, they expected these names to mean something to Jiraiya, given the fact that they hadn’t elaborated and were instead staring expectantly at him. But unfortunately Jiraiya, for all that he fancied himself a man of the world, a man with cosmopolitan tastes, could only stare blankly at them. Finally, he groaned and reminded them, “Hey, kids, I’m not from around here, remember? Mind telling me what all that actually means?”

“Kabuli pulao is a rice dish,” Konan explained patiently. “The rice is steamed, and you put things like lentils and vegetables and meat and sometimes raisins in it.”

“Uh-huh,” Jiraiya muttered absently, copying down what he had told him. He frowned slightly. “What kind of meat?”

Konan waved her fingers back and forth. “In my village, we never put fish on it. Other than that, we put any kind of meat we wanted on it. I never cared much which—so long as it wasn’t snake,” she added with a shudder.

Orochimaru would probably thank her, if he ever knew. Jiraiya turned his attention to Yahiko. “Okay, what about yours?”

Yahiko scratched his cheek with one hand, staring up at the ceiling. “Umm… It was…” He hesitated, his brow furrowing. “…It was sweet, and fried… and I think we ate it in a syrup.”

Well, that didn’t tell Jiraiya anywhere near as much as he needed to know to cook it. “Can you be more specific?” he pressed, his pen hovering in the air over the notebook. “You haven’t even told me what it’s made of.”

To this, Yahiko hunched his shoulders and folded his arms around his chest. “It was a long time ago,” he defended himself, an over-bright gleam in his blue eyes. “I don’t remember anything else. I just remember really liking it.”

Jiraiya looked at him in silence.

“Aren’t they fried milk balls?” Nagato asked Yahiko quietly, peering into his friend’s face.

Yahiko relaxed slightly. “Yeah, I think they are.”

“Okay, ‘fried milk balls,’” Jiraiya repeated, as he added that to the list. He looked up at the three children standing opposite him and grinned. “Come February, we’re gonna have a feast!”

“Are you sure about that, Sensei? Fresh vegetables are hard to find in winter.”

“Hey, don’t forget who you’re talking to! Jiraiya-sama _always_ delivers!”

Never mind that he had no idea what the recipe for either of these dishes were.

-0-0-0-

Training was _not_ called off just because of bad weather; if it was, they wouldn’t have been able to train more than once every other week. That the cold had half-frozen the rain didn’t make a difference. Six days out of every week, Jiraiya, Yahiko, Konan and Nagato got up just after dawn, ate, dressed, and went outside to train until lunch. After lunch, they trained for three hours more, at which point they called it quits for the day and went inside to dry off.

“Okay, let’s see how well you all hit your targets,” Jiraiya called out over the rain and the thunder, motioning for the three of them to form a line in front of the target he had set up. He only had enough kunai and shuriken for one person (and in fact, the target was an old road sign with a bull’s eye painted on it), so he usually had them take it in turns at accuracy training for kunai and shuriken. “I want you to hit the target all times today with the kunai, so we’re not gonna stop until you do.”

Despite the rain pouring into his face (familiarity had, perhaps, inured him to its effects), Yahiko grinned and punched the air. “I’m gonna do it on the first try!”

Konan murmured agreement, and Nagato mumbled, “I’ll try.”

Jiraiya smirked at the loudest of his students, and pulled a kunai out of the box and held it out to him, hilt-first. Lightning crashed in the distance, lighting up the steel surface of the weapon for just a moment. “If you’re so confident, why don’t you go first?” Yahiko might be feeling cocky today, but the last time Jiraiya checked, the best Yahiko had ever managed was eight out of ten.

There was a discernible edge to Yahiko’s grin as he yanked the kunai out of Jiraiya’s hand and took up a position in the target, the mud squelching beneath his feet. His grin melted away in favor of a scrunched-up look of intense concentration as he lined up his shot. The first kunai hit the target on its outermost ring. The second, third and fourth had the same result.

The fifth kunai hit the target in the second of its four rings, and the sixth came close to hitting the dot in the center, making Yahiko smirk. Seven and eight hit the ring closest to the dot.

When the ninth kunai hit the target, Jiraiya’s eyebrows shot up. It looked like Yahiko’s boasting might not have been all talk after all. But alas, Yahiko couldn’t _completely_ pull off his boast—the tenth kunai struck the hilt of one already lodged in the target, and landed with a splash in a nearby puddle.

Konan giggled. “Looks like you couldn’t do it all the first time after all.” Beside her, Nagato cracked a small smile.

“Aww, shut up,” Yahiko muttered, his face extremely red. He went to jerk the kunai out of the target. “Watch me get it _this_ time.”

“Hold it, Yahiko.” Jiraiya put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and shook his head. “You’ve gotta let the others have their turn first.”

Yahiko stared up at him, his mouth caught in an almost lopsided frown. For a moment, Jiraiya thought he might balk, but eventually, Yahiko let the kunai fall into their box with a metallic clatter. “Sorry, I forgot.” He took up a spot behind Konan and Yahiko, his face slightly tight.

Jiraiya bit back a sigh. It was one thing to tell Yahiko to let go of his anger; it was quite another to find a way to convince the boy to _actually_ let go of his anger. _At least he can rein it in for stuff like this_.

(And sometimes, Jiraiya looked at the blasted landscape, at the burnt-out buildings, the razed villages, the hills pocked with craters from mine blasts turned into treacherous sinkholes and deceptively shallow mud puddles. He looked at it, and he could understand anger. But the houses would be rebuilt, the villages would prosper again, and the sinkholes would be filled in. All would be well, eventually. Wouldn’t it?)

Konan got nine out of ten on the first try, and Nagato, eight. Konan and Nagato only needed one more try after their first to get a perfect score; Yahiko, deeply embarrassed, needed two. Jiraiya nodded approvingly. They certainly were making progress where accuracy was concerned, at least with kunai (As for shuriken, well, let’s just say they were still mastering the basics).

Next up was hand-to-hand sparring—the three kids against each other, that was; any match between them and Jiraiya, or even his Kage Bunshin, would have ended too quickly for anyone to really learn anything. As Jiraiya supervised their matches, occasionally calling out advice, he began to frown, watching over them ambivalently.

Yahiko did fairly well for his experience level, the same as always. He’d paid attention to all of Jiraiya’s lessons, even the ones he denounced as ‘useless’ for someone like him, but he’d definitely given a bit more of himself to taijutsu training than to anything else. He moved with purpose, wasting so little energy in his strikes that he probably would have come off better in sparring against some of the older students in the Konoha Academy, the ones who still liked to employ wild roundhouses and other energy-wasting punches and kicks. He was fast, too, and that could potentially give him an edge over any adults he met out here. Yahiko wasn’t yet to the point where Jiraiya would let him fight an enemy shinobi, but he’d probably do fine against any civilian bands he ran afoul of. As for Nagato and Konan, well…

Jiraiya winced as Konan landed flat on her back in the sucking mud. She got right back up to her feet, but there was a noticeable hesitancy in her face as she squared off against Yahiko again. They circled around one another for a few seconds, before Yahiko advanced again, and Konan ended up on her back again.

“Konan,” Jiraiya called out, resisting (barely) the urge to massage his temples with his hand, “enough. Yahiko, are you good for another bout?”

“Yes, Sensei.”

“Right. Nagato, you’re up.”

Nagato stepped forwards, his crimson hair plastered to his cheeks and his face taut with worry. His match with Yahiko was short-lived as well: he was down on his knees in the mud after about twenty seconds.

It… It wasn’t like Nagato and Konan weren’t trying. They were progressing faster than Yahiko when it came to simple techniques requiring the use of chakra. Even when sparring, they got right back up after being knocked down, and they never complained about having to fight each other, or Yahiko. They _were_ trying.

But they were both extremely timid about the idea of having to fight one of their friends. When either of them fought Yahiko, they were always on the defensive, always responding to his blows rather than enacting any of their own. And if they fought each other, oh, boy—they’d just circle around one another until Jiraiya had to step in and _tell_ one of them to make the first attack. They both hesitated before every blow, and Jiraiya didn’t need to be a prophet to guess how that would end if they were ever fighting a real battle, instead of this play-fighting in the mud outside their shack.

Nagato, Yahiko and Konan all wanted to be able to protect what they held dear to them. Jiraiya saw that light in their eyes; it was the same across nations, and he knew what it meant. But so far, only Yahiko had made the necessary mental leap to being willing to _hurt_ other people to protect what he held dear. Nagato and Konan hadn’t yet, and Jiraiya honestly wasn’t sure when, if ever, they would.

Konan and Nagato were both gentle children, and to Jiraiya it seemed clear that neither of them had any real taste for violence, not even something on the scale of schoolyard scrapping. In a better world, neither of them need ever have become shinobi. But this wasn’t a better world, and if either of them wanted to protect what they loved, if either of them wanted to live to adulthood, they needed to find it in them to wound or kill those who would wound or kill them.

And Nagato would find his steps dogged by any who ever learned what the spiral pattern of his eyes meant. There were plenty who’d like to get their hands on a dojutsu like the Rinnegan, and had no use for its bearer. He needed to be able to defend himself from those who wished him ill, and if he truly was the Child of Prophecy, he needed a strong grasp of the shinobi arts in order to fulfill his destiny, as well. Jiraiya couldn’t just send a kid like that out into the world with no means of defending himself.

 _They’ve all got a lot of potential,_ Jiraiya thought to himself. _If they work hard, and pick up the right mindset, they’ll all excel—provided they live long enough. Heck, by the time I’m done with them, they could probably go work for Hanzo._

-0-0-0-

There was a town of middling size about four miles from the shack where Jiraiya and his students had settled. It was, as were all towns in the countryside of Ame no Kuni, depressingly void of the vices—prostitution and gambling were both extremely illegal in Ame, and the people in this part of the country didn’t think particularly highly of booze or the people who drank it, so you couldn’t even find a measly tavern in town. What the town _did_ have, however, was plenty of stands and stores selling food, food most people here were more inclined to hoard than share in the winter.

“Now remember, you three: we’re just getting rice today. We don’t need anything else, and we haven’t got the money to spare, right now.”

From what Jiraiya understood, the three of them had stolen most of what they’d eaten before he had taken them on as students—or maybe it would be more accurate to say that Yahiko had stolen most of what they’d eaten, with Konan and Nagato occasionally assisting in the thefts. When they were homeless with no one to care for them, it had made sense. There weren’t a whole lot of other ways for them to get food back when they were urchins wandering the countryside. But now, they had some money, even if it was only what Jiraiya had had on him at the time, supplemented what the kids could make doing odd jobs or selling junk they found tossed out by the side of the road. If they went about stealing their food now, it was only going to make them unwelcome in town.

Yahiko made a beeline for the same store they always bought rice from. That was probably because the storeowner, an elderly woman named Saira, was usually content to give them all the rice they needed for the week in exchange for some chores done around her house upstairs. If there was anything these three kids knew how to pick out in a crowd, it was a bleeding heart. _That’s probably why they went straight to me—they could tell there was a softie in my squad,_ Jiraiya mused, rolling his eyes.

They stepped out of the drizzling rain and into the mercifully dry, mercifully warm shop. Earthenware jars as tall as any one of the children, painted red, purple, blue, yellow and orange in the geometric patterns favored by the region lined the walls, while in the middle of the store there were shelves full of pickled fruits and vegetables in painted glass jars sealed shut with cork. Half the fruits pickled were ones Jiraiya had never heard of before coming to Ame for the first time; he had some desire to try them, but could never scrounge up enough cash to buy a jar and have enough left over to buy enough food to last through the week.

Konan waved to Saira, sitting behind the desk on which the cash register sat, and Saira waved them over to her. “And what is it you need, children?” she asked in her warbling voice, smiling down at them. The black, holly-embroidered kerchief she wore over her gray hair was slightly crooked, exposing more of the crown of her head than it normally did.

“We need ten pounds of rice, please,” Konan replied, smiling winningly.

“Do you? Well, children, if you listen to me, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ve got chores that need doing, and I’m not as young as I once was. My back can’t take the strain anymore, I’m afraid…”

It was the same thing, every time, like some sort of ritual. Saira rattled off the same speech, and Yahiko, Konan and Nagato listened far more patiently than Jiraiya thought he would have if he was their age and in their shoes. Nagato even managed to meet her gaze without fidgeting, and that kid fidgeted any time an adult looked at her.

Apparently Saira had gotten done telling them what she wanted them to do, because the three of them raced up the stairs to her home. Her gaze met Jiraiya’s in a sideways glance. He tried smiling at her, but she scowled blackly and turned her back to him, perusing what looked like an agricultural catalogue.

 _Typical._ Jiraiya went to stand by the open door. It was going to be a long wait, and a quiet one. Saira had never once said a word to him. Even when he addressed her directly, she ignored him and spoke to the children instead. If he was gonna be stuck here, he might as well try to people-watch, and pick up some news.

Jiraiya hadn’t done so well at ‘making friends’ in town. There were plenty of pretty women, and all of them looked at him as if they would have liked nothing better than to gut him like a fish. There were plenty of old men who looked like they would have had prime gossip to share, but they all turned stony and silent upon sighting him. Everyone in town had figured out that Jiraiya wasn’t an Ame national pretty early on, and had tolerated his presence among them rather poorly ever since. Sometimes he wondered if the only reason he hadn’t been attacked yet was because of Konan and Nagato and Yahiko.

Himself, Jiraiya tried not to do anything that might have provoked someone to pick a fight with him. No one here was a shinobi; he’d wipe the floor with anyone who attacked him in five seconds, flat. But under the circumstances, fighting sounded just like the thing that would make the angry villagers come after him with torches and pitchforks. He had no idea how long it would take them to find somewhere else safe to settle down if he had to take his students and move. He wouldn’t do that to them.

“There was another attack last night.”

“Oh, no. Really?”

At the sound of whispering coming from two customers under the awning of the shop next door, Jiraiya’s ears pricked. Careful not to look directly at them, he angled his head so that he could better listen to their conversation.

“Yeah, it happened in that little village ten miles north of here. Raiders came and turned the place upside down looking for food, money, weapons, you name it. Then they burned the whole place down and killed everyone they could find. My neighbor’s cousin was living there; she was one of the only ones who managed to get away. She came running here; that’s where I heard it from.”

“So, were they Iwa nin again?”

 _Again?_ Jiraiya grimaced. He’d been out of the loop ever since he’d started teaching Konan, Nagato and Yahiko, but this was embarrassing.

“Yeah, they were. Nida says there were about twenty of them.”

“Th-that’s the third village they’ve attacked since the war ended. What if they come here?”

“I don’t know. Try to get to Amegakure, I guess.”

The rain picked up, coming down hard and rhythmic on the rooftops and the dirt road, and Jiraiya could no longer make out clearly what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. He’d heard all he needed to know. He pressed his hand over his mouth, eyes narrowed.

In theory, all the forces that had been fighting each other on Ame soil, Konoha, Suna and Iwa, had all pulled out and returned to their own lands at war’s end. In practice, well, after a war, there were always those shinobi who ‘lagged behind’ returning home, and despoiled the countryside of its valuable goods. There were even those shinobi who decided that they’d make a better living as bandits, and went rogue. It was a shameful reality, that even one shinobi would abandon their nation for wealth, and like all deserters, they were marked for death, but that couldn’t erase the fact that they’d turned traitor out of greed.

But typically, bandits didn’t work in large groups, and they usually jumped civilians on the road after nightfall. They didn’t burn whole villages or put their inhabitants to the sword—there went a viable source of wealth, right there. This sounded like something very different from typical banditry.

 _A prelude to annexation?_ Jiraiya wondered. That could be it, the Tsuchikage testing how much he could get away with before the shinobi of the land—or, for that matter, a local militia—came out in force to try to drive them off. Strategically, Ame was prime real estate; it could potentially serve as a launching point for the invasion of three of the major nations. Jiraiya could see, easily, why someone from the outside world would want the place for themselves.

He smirked. If the Tsuchikage did opt for invasion, Jiraiya had a pretty good idea of what would happen. Hanzo would come out, kill most of the invaders, put the fear of the gods back into the survivors, and that would be the end of any dreams of a Tsuchi-occupied Ame. Yeah, no way this place was going to be annexed.

Still, if that was really what this was about, those Iwa nin could do a lot of damage before they gave up. _It’s sure not gonna make me any more popular around here—and_ these _are the people I’ve gotta get those recipes for Yahiko and Konan’s birthday from._

-0-0-0-

Today was a rarity for Ame in winter. Not only had it not rained all day, the sun was actually out, sort of—the pockmarked hills were illuminated by watery shafts of sunlight that quavered and shifted with each movement of the clouds. Not clear skies, maybe (Jiraiya didn’t think he’d seen the sky in Ame completely clear of clouds more than five times, and he’d been here for nearly two years, now), but it sure was something.

After training was done, Nagato and Yahiko had immediately run off into the nearby forest, eager to take advantage of the fair weather to go exploring in the nearby forest. Konan was outside, too, but was hanging around closer to the shack; she’d proved more of a homebody than the boys.

Himself, Jiraiya was trying to get some work done on his novel. He’d hit a snag with his latest plot development. His hero was facing a challenge, both to his life and his integrity, the biggest one yet. Oh, he’d keep his integrity, no question. A true hero was stalwart; he never doubted either his village, his friends, or himself. The problem was that, at his current skill level, Jiraiya wasn’t sure how the hero was supposed to come out of the impending battle alive. He was nearly out of chakra, and his allies were racing to catch up with him, but probably wouldn’t make it there in time.

 _Should I have him stall for time long enough for his friends to show up?_ Jiraiya wondered, tapping the butt of his brush against the kitchen table. He ignored the spray of black ink droplets that flew from the brush’s fibers to the surface of the table. So long as they didn’t get on the paper, he didn’t really care where the ink landed. _Or should I have him get a second wind when the villain tells him to give up?_

The second option sounded a lot more likely. “ _You can give up on me giving up_!” _was_ the hero’s catchphrase, after all. Was he just going to keel over and quit because he was outnumbered and he was nearly out of chakra? No! If anything, he’d probably take something like that as a challenge.

Jiraiya jotted down a few more paragraphs, and made some notes in his plotting notebook. Then, frowning, he got up from the table and headed for the back door. He hadn’t sighted any more enemy shinobi in the area (at least not _yet_ ), and he hadn’t heard any commotion outside, but it’d probably be a good idea to check on those kids, just in case.

Jiraiya pulled the back door open, a blast of frigid, humid air hitting his face, only to find Konan sitting on the covered stoop, her head bowed and all of her concentration bent on a piece of origami she was fashioning out of a piece of paper. She hadn’t reacted to him opening the door (Jiraiya needed to remind her to be aware of her surroundings at all times; it was way too easy to sneak up on her when she was this absorbed in origami), and she gave no indication that she’d felt the slightly warmer air from inside reach her back. Her fine blue hair brushed her shoulders as she worked.

What was she making? A crane? No, the profile wasn’t right; it looked like some other sort of bird. Jiraiya had seen Konan craft a truly ridiculous amount of origami plants and animals over the last several months; he wouldn’t be surprised if she knew some shapes he hadn’t even seen.

When finished, the paper’s form was indeed that of a bird. That wasn’t the most extraordinary thing, though. Jiraiya watched, slack-jawed, as Konan lifted the bird up into the air and it leapt out of her hands, whizzing around in the air under its own power, for all the world like a real bird.

“That’s incredible!” Jiraiya exclaimed when the bird landed on Konan’s upturned palms.

Konan jumped and whipped around, white-faced. “S-sensei!” she stammered.

Jiraiya barely heard her. “Where’d you learn how to do something like that, Konan? Something like that would be great in combat!”

Konan narrowed her eyes, lowering her head slightly. “My mother taught it to me,” she said flatly. “She was the priestess of our village. She told me that it was only meant to be used to carry messages back and forth—never for violence.”

Well. Jiraiya felt his face grow hot. “Hey, you don’t have to use it for fighting if you don’t want to,” he said quickly. “It was just a suggestion; I didn’t know it had a special use.”

She stared up at him, her face oddly wan. “Jiraiya-sensei?” Her voice was a touch strained. “Can we… talk about my mother?”

Somehow, Jiraiya was already sure that he wasn’t going to like where this was going. But regardless, he sat down beside her on the clammy stone and nodded reassuringly. “Sure, Konan.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, smiling weakly. “My mother was the priestess of a temple devoted to the worship of the Sage of Six Paths.”

Jiraiya nodded again. He’d heard that there were people who worshipped the Sage of Six Paths as a god, though as far as he knew, none of them lived in Konoha. Kushina told him that there had been people in Uzu who worshipped the Sage, but their temples were now destroyed, and the people who had worshipped him most likely gone.

“Our village sprung up around the temple,” Konan explained, “and we all worshipped the Sage. My mother was a gentle priestess.” Konan stared straight ahead, her pale, bluish-gray eyes glassy. “She… was teaching me how to be a priestess, too. Every day, we swept the temple floors, we cleaned the idol if it got dirty, washed the mats if they needed washing. I listened to my mother when she gave people advice about how to live virtuous lives, and I went with her when she went to people’s homes to perform purification rituals after someone was born or died. She taught me how to pray and make offerings.

“My mother…” Konan’s voice cracked, and Jiraiya frowned, concerned, but before he could say anything, she went on, “my mother really was a gentle priestess. She never hit me; she never even raised her voice when I acted up. She took a vow not to eat meat or eggs, so whenever we have a meal with meat in it, she’d pick all the meat off of her plate and put it on mine instead. All the priests of the Sage of Six Paths are taught how to fight, but my mother swore a vow of non-violence; she would never harm another human, not even if they defiled the temple or tried to kill her.

“I remember when the war came to our part of Ame.” Konan drew a shuddering breath and smiled bitterly. “Shinobi from Konoha and Suna were fighting in the mountains surrounding our village, setting forest fires, stealing livestock and crops, burning farmsteads and killing anyone who helped the opposing side. My mother tended to the wounded mountain-folk who took shelter in our village, and every time she heard about another attack, her hands would start to shake.

“Then,” Konan said softly, her eyes glittering like chips of ice, “my mother did something that would have been unthinkable to her before the war started. She took a sword, went up into the mountains, and started killing every foreign shinobi she could find.”

“Good for her,” Jiraiya remarked, trying not to think about the fact that Konan’s mother had probably killed a fair number of shinobi from his own village. He instead reflected on how impressive her skill with a sword must have been to be able to take down chunin and even jonin.

“Mother didn’t think it was ‘good!’” Konan retorted, in a sharper voice than Jiraiya thought he’d ever heard her use. “She thought that she had defiled herself. She wouldn’t perform rites, make offerings, or even go into the temple anymore. She thought that she’d defile the temple if she set foot there. She gave all her duties to a layman who’d had some training, and every day she’d go out into the hills and kill people.” Konan stared down at the ground, white-lipped. “She’d come back covered in blood, and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She wouldn’t say anything to me, she barely ate, and she couldn’t sleep. It was like she was a different person. She acted like she was already dead.

“I guess they figured out which village she was from, because a group of Suna nin came to our village…” She swallowed hard, her face taut “…and started killing everyone there. My mother fought to the end, but eventually, they managed to kill her.” Konan clenched her hands, crushing the paper bird she had made beneath her fingers. “I… keep thinking about the fact that she died with a sword in her hands instead of a rosary,” she admitted, her eyes over-bright.

“I’m sorry,” Jiraiya told her, feeling more than a little uncomfortable at what he’d just heard. No priest, regardless of their religion, swore their vows lightly, or at the very least, they didn’t swear vows of pacifism lightly. How dire did someone’s situation have to be, how great their anguish, to break such a vow? Not particularly heroic; a true hero never forswore their vows, after all. But not everyone had it in them to be a hero.

Konan opened her hands, revealing the remains of the paper bird. “Sensei,” she said, very softly, “I was thinking… What if I…” She squeezed her eyes shut, set her jaw. “To protect my friends, what if I did something unthinkable, too?” She stroked the crumpled bird with her thumb. A gust of wind blew her hair over her face, obscuring it from view.

Jiraiya paused, staring at her. Something cold unfurled in his stomach, like he had swallowed a lump of ice. Then, he nodded slowly. “We’ll work together, and see if we can’t find some way to weaponize your… paper jutsu,” he settled on, unable to think of anything else to call it. The priests of the Sage probably had a name for it, but Jiraiya couldn’t find one to ask them. “Even if we can’t, it will still be invaluable as a means of communication.”

Konan opened her eyes and looked up at him unsmilingly. Once again, her eyes looked like chips of ice. “Thank you, Sensei.”

She went back inside, but Jiraiya stayed out on the stoop, staring up at the gray sky, troubled at the light he had seen in her eyes.

Konan, he thought, would have made a good priestess. With her disposition, she was better-suited for it than for being a kunoichi. But he wondered how long it would have been before she, too, broke her vows.

-0-0-0-

The year had turned. Violent winds had come to visit from further north, come to strip the short, spindly trees of their few brown leaves. There had been a few days where dawn broke to reveal a light powdering of snow on the ground, but it soon disappeared, washed away by rain, or melted into the mud.

Jiraiya supposed it was time he tried to pick up the recipes. Yahiko and Konan’s birthday was less than two months away, and nothing would be more embarrassing than having to show himself empty-handed to those kids after the promise he had made them. Hopefully, someone would actually be willing to _talk_ to him long enough to give him what he needed.

Today was an open market day in town. Within the limits of the law, anyone could sell anything they wished in the market square. As such, Jiraiya had sent Konan, Nagato and Yahiko off with some of the odds and ends they found out by the road leading into town, along with some origami pieces Konan had made for the occasion. They’d do alright—those kids sure did know how to haggle (well, Yahiko and Konan knew how to haggle), and Konan’s origami was always a big hit. Meanwhile, after seeing them off, Jiraiya made his way to the store where they so often bought rice.

Though Saira wasn’t at all fond of Jiraiya, she had shown herself (or so Jiraiya thought) reasonably fond of his students. Even if she didn’t like Jiraiya, there was a chance that she might help him anyway, out of affection for those kids. Well, it was worth a shot.

Jiraiya found the oil lamps in the store extinguished, and the store itself empty. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and heaved a sigh. It was entirely possible that Saira had gone out to the market; when he’d looked earlier, half the town seemed to be there already. Going upstairs to see if she was in her house didn’t sound like a good idea; if she _was_ up there, she’d probably think he had come to kill her, or some ridiculous thing like that. Waiting outside for her to come back would probably put her on edge. No, the best thing to do was to go the market, ignore the searing glares he’d likely pick up from anyone who recognized him, and find Saira and explained what he wanted from her, and why.

But just before Jiraiya stepped out of the store, he heard footsteps on the stairs. “I’m coming!” Saira called out in her warbling voice. “The store isn’t closed; I’m coming! Now, what…” Her voice trailed off as she came far enough down the stairs to see who had been waiting for her. The smile faded off of her face, replaced by a tight-lipped frown. She did not come all the way down the stairs, but instead kept to the third stair from the bottom, lingering in the narrow, shadowy stairwell.

Obviously, it would be up to Jiraiya to make the first move. “Good morning, Saira,” he said courteously, careful not to walk any closer to her than he already was. If he made her feel threatened, this was all gonna be over pretty quickly.

Saira gave no response. She folded her arms tight across her chest, the black embroidery on her sleeves distorting into unrecognizable shapes.

 _Oh, great, the silent treatment again._ Jiraiya frowned. “Look, Saira, I need to talk to you. It’s Yahiko and Konan’s birthdays soon, and I’m cooking for them, but I don’t know the recipes for what they want. Konan wants kabuli pulao, and Yahiko wants gulab jamun. Can you help me out here?”

Saira’s frown deepened. “You’re… cooking for them.” She spoke in Common instead of Ame’s mother tongue, which was a good thing for Jiraiya. He’d been here long enough to have a solid grasp of the language, but he didn’t want to reveal that to someone who wasn’t friendly to him.

“Well, yeah. Trust me, none of them are good enough cooks to be left at the stove unsupervised.”

She curled her lip ever-so-slightly. “Before I give you an answer, let’s talk about those children. How did you meet them?”

Jiraiya stiffened, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “They were begging for food.”

“I see. And what is it that prompted you to take them into your care?”

“I wanted to look after them for a while. Later, I decided to teach them ninjutsu for self-defense, too.”

“And eventually—“ Saira tapped her arm with her finger “—you will go back to your own land, your own life, and leave them here.”

Jiraiya jerked back slightly. “They don’t want to go to my home village with me, trust me. And they’ll be able to defend themselves,” he pointed out defensively, for all that he felt like he shouldn’t have to explain himself to her. “They’re not going to be helpless.”

“I see,” Saira replied, in clipped tones.

Silence fell between them, thick as one of the woolen blankets Jiraiya had seen for sale in the square. What was all this about? Jiraiya wondered, with some irritation. If she didn’t like him, fine, but what was with this interrogation? It didn’t have anything to do with food and recipes.

Then, Saira said suddenly, her voice very tight, “Why are you caring for them?”

Jiraiya stared at her incredulously. “I just told you; I wanted to teach them—“

“Oh, yes, you told me _what_ it was you plan to do, but you’ve not said a word as to the reason _why_!” Saira’s dark eyes flashed. “You told me you met them begging for food; perhaps you remember why they would have to beg? They’ve told me that they are orphans, all three of them; perhaps you remember why?”

Jiraiya set his jaw. “I remember,” he said in a hard voice. “You may not like it, but that’s the reality of war.” Civilians never seemed to understand that; why was death so much less immediate to them?

Saira drew a whistling breath in from between gritted teeth. “Oh, yes, death is a reality of war, just as it is a reality of peace as well. But we were not the ones fighting the war, not originally. Do you remember _that_?” she snapped, baring her teeth.

The rain started to patter no the rooftops overhead, and for all the world Jiraiya thought he heard it echoing her question.

“I remember.”

“Do you really think that what you’re doing can make a difference?” Saira challenged him, jutting her jaw. “Do you?”

 _Don’t let her get to you._ Jiraiya took a deep, steadying breath. “Did you ever hear this story?” he asked Saira. Without waiting for her to respond, he went on, “A man goes to the beach, only to find thousands of starfish washed up on the shore, suffering under the baking sun. The man starts to pick up the starfish and throw them back into the ocean, one by one. Eventually, someone else came along and asked him why he’d bother. Did he really think it was going to make a difference? The man picked up another starfish, threw it back in the ocean, and said ‘It made a difference for that one.’”

Saira fixed him in a withering stare, saying nothing. Clearly, someone wasn’t exactly impressed by Jiraiya’s story. Then again, she had probably never even seen a starfish before, so that might at least partially account for this underwhelmed reaction.

Eventually, Saira sighed heavily and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “Wait here,” she told him, disappearing back up the staircase.

She was gone for several minutes, leaving Jiraiya to ponder her words, and her motive for speaking thusly. He felt as though there had been an unspoken question buried under the ones that had actually been put to the air. He could grasp at the edges of it, but couldn’t guess at its shape. _I wish she’d just say what she means_.

When Saira came down, she held two folded-up sheets of paper in one hand, and a bundle wrapped in black-and-white checkered cloth in the other. “Your recipes,” she said shortly, thrusting the papers out at Jiraiya. “Also, has the girl hit menarche yet?”

“What?!” Jiraiya gaped at her, stunned. He’d never known anyone at home to talk about that so frankly. “No, not that I’ve noticed.”

Saira laughed humorlessly. “Oh, you’ll notice. Well, she’ll need these sooner or later—“ she held the cloth-wrapped bundle to Jiraiya, who, though still gaping, took it “—so give this to her. They’re menstrual pads; they can be reused, but they need to be washed with strong soap, and left to soak in boiling water for at least half an hour.”

“…Right.”

Jiraiya tucked the papers in his pocket so as to keep them from getting wet, and wasted no time getting out of the store. _At least I got what I came for—even if that conversation did end up getting_ way _too graphic._

Once back at the shack (and Jiraiya had explained what the bundle was to Konan, who was a lot more nonchalant about it than he would have expected), the four of them went over the ingredient list, one of the children occasionally having to explain what something was to their teacher.

“Okay, what the heck is khoya?” Jiraiya asked in befuddlement, pointing out the item in question.

“You make khoya by heating milk in a saucepan until the water evaporates and it gets solid,” Nagato explained. “They…” He frowned, as if trying to remember something. “…They usually sell it at a dairy.”

Okay, so that would be easy to find. Good thing, too, since it was apparently one of the main ingredients in gulab jamun. Speaking of the ingredient list for that particular dish… “And what is kewra?”

Nagato paused, his mouth slightly open, before admitting, “I don’t know.” Konan and Yahiko both shook their heads in similar confusion.

“Must be a local thing,” Jiraiya sighed. As he had discovered, Nagato had been right on the money when he said that gulab jamun was made of fried milk balls, thought it wasn’t like you could just make them out of regular milk. Apparently, these fried milk balls were served soaked in some kind of syrup. Kewra was a possible choice for this syrup, but since it was one of three, and Jiraiya knew exactly what rosewater and saffron were, that kewra remained a mystery food wasn’t much of an issue. “Alright, let’s talk about availability.”

“We shouldn’t get rosewater for the gulab jamun,” Konan answered promptly. “Even if we can find it, it’ll be way too expensive.” She smiled apologetically at Yahiko. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Yahiko muttered. “I like saffron syrup better, anyways. Chicken’s gonna be a problem for your dish, though. The price for chicken’s gone way up.”

“I know! Did you see the prices on those whole chickens in the butcher’s shop?! We could have food for a month if we had that kind of money!”

Jiraiya grimaced. Chickens and other poultry were prime targets for theft by bandits looking to steal livestock. Once dead, the birds were a lot easier to transport than were the likes of pigs, goats, sheep, horses or cows. That probably had something to do with why chickens were suddenly so expensive in town.

“So we’ll get mutton,” Konan went on, clasping her hands on the table. “Mutton’s much cheaper.”

Meanwhile, Nagato was looking at the ingredient list for kabuli pulao and frowning slightly. “Can we _get_ carrots at this time of year?” he asked doubtfully.

Yahiko shook his head. “Probably not, unless you want ‘em pickled. We could get some other dried fruit or some nuts to go in instead. Konan, you told me you like dried figs, don’t you? And walnuts?”

“Yes, I do.”

“We’ll get those instead.”

 _Listen to them, already talking like a bunch of regular grown-ups._ Jiraiya resisted the urge to smirk. _I could almost trust them with my checkbook! Almost._

Okay, the question of availability had been answered. It stung a little to have to substitute ingredients, but since it was the kids themselves who had suggested it, Jiraiya was less unhappy with the idea than he otherwise might have been. All of the ingredients that had gone undiscussed were ones Jiraiya recognized, and had seen in town at fairly reasonable prices. They wouldn’t have any trouble getting them. As for cooking all of this…

Whoever had last occupied this shack had either left in a hurry, or had died away from home, because the shack had been more or less fully-furnished, as far as shacks went. There was a wood-burning stove and oven, something the kids had told him was a bread oven, and plenty of cooking utensils and implements. However, the recipe for gulab jamun said that the milk balls had to be deep-fried, and what they did _not_ have was a pot deep enough to serve the purpose. The closest they had was a cast-iron frying pan about six inches deep.

 _It’s doable. Everything’s not gonna look—or taste—like it would if a professional made it, but it is doable_.

-0-0-0-

An activity Jiraiya and his students periodically undertook instead of regular training was to go out into the nearby forest, so that Jiraiya could teach them what he knew about medicinal and poisonous plants. He’d read enough of Tsunade’s medical scrolls and textbooks while bored to know which plants were poisonous, which were medicinal, and what the uses of the latter were. Of course, at this time of year, the only things Jiraiya could point out were tree bark and the leaves and berries of evergreen bushes, but it was still something. It was knowledge the kids could put to use in the future, and it was a nice change of pace from the usual training, besides.

Of course, once Jiraiya had finished his lesson, this foray into nature had immediately given way to the kids wanting to go exploring. Yahiko had stuck around close to where Jiraiya was, trying to climb high enough in a slim, smooth tree with few low-hanging branches to see if a bird’s nest he had spotted had eggs in it (Though, he hastily assured Jiraiya, he did not want to eat the eggs, if they were there—he just wanted to look at them). Nagato and Konan had headed further away, the former wanting to show the latter a creek Konan had never seen, since she had never ventured too far into the forest before. They had quickly vanished from sight, swallowed up by the hills.

Jiraiya let out an exasperated breath as the mud nearly pulled one of his shoes off of his feet. He enjoyed walks in the woods in winter back in Hi, but at least the ground there was solid. Here, he found himself contending with a rather impressive muck of mud, dead leaves, twigs and moss. If Jiraiya didn’t know better, he’d swear he was dealing with quicksand’s (even) slower, more obnoxious cousin.

 _Home…_ Jiraiya sighed, staring up at the slivers of steel-gray sky visible through the canopy. He’d told Tsunade and Orochimaru what to tell Sandaime about his absence. That Jiraiya hadn’t yet run into Konoha ANBU trying to drag him home told him that the old man must have understood. At least he still had a home to return to, once his time here was done. Still, it would have been nice to know how the old homestead was doing.

 _I wonder how Tsunade’s holding up_ , Jiraiya wondered, stroking his chin. Tsunade hadn’t been the same since Dan died. For one thing, she’d quit the Medical Corps, and for another, whenever she saw blood, she just sort of… froze. It wasn’t as bad as it had been—Tsunade had actually had to go home for a while for ‘evaluation,’ and what Jiraiya hoped had been plenty of downtime. She had only returned in time for the last five months of the campaign in Ame. She wasn’t completely back to normal—still froze up at the sight of blood, lost her fucking mind if it got _on_ her—but she could still fight, so there really was no justification for keeping someone as strong as her away from the frontlines.

_Hopefully some post-war downtime will be enough to get her back to normal. It’d help if Sarutobi-sensei didn’t assign her any missions outside of the village for the time being, too._

Jiraiya wondered briefly how Orochimaru was doing, but snorted and told himself not to worry about that guy. Orochimaru might well not have even felt his absence yet, he was so constantly absorbed in his jutsu research. Jiraiya couldn’t think of anything capable of truly rattling Orochimaru, and his absence sure wasn’t gonna do it.

Jiraiya stiffened suddenly, frowning. Something felt… wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but all of a sudden, the cold air felt charged. He cast his gaze all around him, searching the trees and undergrowth for any sign of something strange. When that turned up nothing, he strained his hearing, trying to pick up something, anything unusual.

He heard leaves rustling, more so than the wind could account for, especially since the only leaves left now were the slick ones lying wet and dead on the ground. There were a few thumps, and a high-pitched, strangled cry. It was coming from…

Heart racing, Jiraiya ran full-pelt towards the source of the commotion, barely hearing Yahiko calling after him.

As he wove his way through the trees, Jiraiya saw from the top of a steep hill the scene playing out. There were Nagato and Konan, and two adult men attacking them. One got Konan in a headlock, only to let out a howl of pain and drop her when she bit down hard on his arm. Konan’s victory was short-lived; when she tried to land a blow no her attacker’s chest, he snarled, grabbed her hair in his hand and brought his knee to her abdomen with a sickening crunch. When he let go, she fell to the ground limply, clutching her stomach and whimpering in pain.

Nagato was faring little better than Konan. He had traded a few blows with his attacker, a tall, burly man with arms as thick as tree trunks, but the man was too strong for Nagato to block all of his attacks, and soon, the boy was pinned to the ground, spitting out leaves and desperately shouting out “Let go of me!”, all while his attacker smirked and dug his knee ever deeper into his back.

Jiraiya drew a kunai and paused, trying to guess which of the two men he should go for first: the one looming over Konan, none-too-gently nudging her with his foot, or the one who had Nagato pinned to the ground?

Then, the second man let his knee up just enough to wind his fingers in Nagato’s hair and bring the boy’s head up for closer inspection. Nagato tried to scratch at his eyes, but to no avail; the man just laughed and batted his hands away. “The girl’s pretty enough for the market,” he called out to his comrade. Jiraiya froze, and Konan looked up from the ground, her face etched with fear and absolutely bloodless. “And you,” the man said with a grin as he looked back at Nagato, “my, what interesting eyes you have. I know a lot of people who would pay a high price for them. Why don’t we go meet them, you and I?”

Okay, definitely that one.

The man holding Nagato down was dead before he knew what was happening, a kunai sticking out of his throat. He toppled over on top of Nagato, who quickly squirmed out from under the corpse. Next came the man looming over Konan; he went out the same way as his fellow, though mercifully he didn’t fall on top of the wheezing girl.

Their enemies dispatched, and with no sign of more coming out of the woodwork to avenge them, Jiraiya strode quickly down the hill, heading first for Nagato, who was crouched by the corpse of the man who had attacked him. The copper stench of blood rose from the man’s corpse, digging under skin and clinging to clothes. Jiraiya knelt down beside him and clapped the boy on his shoulder, and immediately regretted it when Nagato flinched. “Hey, you okay?” Jiraiya asked in a low voice.

Nagato shook his head mutely, not meeting Jiraiya’s gaze. He was covered in mud and trembling, his white hands clenched on his knees. Finally, he managed, in a barely audible voice, “That man… He…” He broke off, drawing in a harsh, almost choking breath.

“Yeah,” Jiraiya muttered, something bitter lodging in his throat. “But it’s over now. He won’t get the chance.” He could hardly blame Nagato for being rattled; himself, Jiraiya shuddered to think of what could have happened if he had shown up even five minutes later. Maybe Nagato would have lost control and used his Rinnegan on them, the same as he had done to kill that Iwa chunin months ago, but maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe his attackers would have incapacitated him before he could.

“Sensei? Hey, Sensei!” Yahiko’s voice sounded somewhere behind him “What’s the—Konan?!” His voice turned high-pitched and panicked. “Konan, what happened?! What…” He trailed off. “Oh,” Yahiko muttered tightly, anger simmering in his voice.

That was right; he still needed to check on Konan. Jiraiya got to his feet, turning around and wincing when he saw Konan doubled over and clutching her abdomen, while Yahiko hovered over her anxiously. Jiraiya crouched down in front of her. “How are you feeling, Konan?”

With apparent difficulty, Konan lifted her head enough for her pale eyes, visibly watering, to meet Jiraiya’s. “Like… Like I’m going… to be sick,” she gasped raggedly, hunching her shoulders.

“Do you think you have any broken ribs?” Jiraiya asked seriously. While he knew some first aid, he wasn’t a med-nin, or a civilian doctor. If Konan had any broken ribs, they needed to get her to town for treatment, and fast.

But Konan stared at him blankly. “How… would I tell?”

Jiraiya closed his mouth down over a sigh. Of course a civilian-raised child, even the child of a priestess, wouldn’t know how to identify injuries like that. The boys probably didn’t either. Well, that was something else he was going to have to start teaching them. “When you breathe in, do you feel pain?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, is it more sore or searing? Does it linger?”

“I…” Konan hesitated, her brow knit. His knees wobbling slightly, Nagato went and sat down beside her. “Sort of… in the middle?”

Jiraiya nodded. It was probably too early to know for sure, but still… “Okay, Konan. I am going to start poking you around the area of where that guy hit you. You tell me if it hurts worse in any one spot than it does in the others.”

He prodded her abdomen with two fingers, watching Konan’s face for her reaction, in case she decided to be stubborn and not admit that one spot hurt worse than the others. But when he was done, she’d given no stronger reaction than a wince, and she shook her head. “It all feels.. about the same.”

“Right.”

He’d check on her again in a couple of hours, by which time, if she didn’t really have any broken ribs, the initial pain would probably have gone down. Now, to inspect the corpses.

Jiraiya hauled the bodies of Nagato and Konan’s would-be kidnappers to a clear spot nearby, and began going through their clothes for any kind of identification. They’d spoken in Common rather than Ame’s mother tongue, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Neither of them were wearing a hitai-ate, with or without a slash mark through the symbol of the village they came from. Maybe they were just civilian bandits—you didn’t have to be a shinobi to realize that Nagato’s eyes would fetch a high price on the black market; outside of Konoha, doujutsu were rare and highly prized.

Eventually, Jiraiya found a wallet on one of the corpses, and flipped it open. Jiraiya looked over the ID he found inside, and his heart sank. This guy was a chunin from Iwagakure.

_Guess those Iwa ‘bandits’ I heard about in town have started spreading out here after all._

Jiraiya turned to his students. He’d deal with the bodies later; for now… “Come on, kids. Let’s go home.”

­-0-0-0-

Once he’d gotten the three of them back to the shack (Konan needing to be carried most of the way; she’d tried to walk, but soon began to lag too far behind), Jiraiya went back to the scene of that short-lived skirmish. He sealed the corpses into a scroll and carried them a few more miles out, past the forest and out to hills clothed only with brown grass and boulders covered with lichen, scored with craters from mine blasts. He dumped the bodies there. If their buddies found them, they’d be less likely to make a beeline for the shack, and maybe it would send them a message, too.

By the time Jiraiya got back, it was past dark and pouring down rain, the rain coming down as hard and cold as hail, the wind howling like a mother robbed of her children. He’d let the kids know he was home, then went to sit out on the back stoop, mindless of the cold. The lamplight inside, emanating through the windows and the cracks in the door, coalesced into a pool of golden light on the stoop. Meanwhile, the rain came down in droves, pouring over the edge of the roof in silver sheets.

Jiraiya leaned back on his palms and frowned. If what he thought was going on _was_ going on, than the sooner the Tsuchikage made his move, the better. Those Iwa nin needed to clear out of Ame no Kuni.

“Why…” Jiraiya heard Nagato’s quavering voice through the thin wall. He narrowed his eyes. “…Why are they always making trouble here? Why won’t they just go home?”

Yahiko said something that Jiraiya couldn’t make out over the rain. He could, quite clearly, make out the sound of him slamming his fist against the floor. _Yahiko…_

“My mother told me this story, once,” Konan said to them. As it turned out, she hadn’t had any ribs broken, and the pain in her abdomen had subsided enough for her to talk without too much difficulty. “Once, there was a mountain that liked to cause landslide that destroyed everything in its path, forests, houses, streams and lakes.

“One day, one of these landslides destroyed the home of a pebble that lived at the base of the mountain. The pebble traveled to the peak of the mountain, hoping to reason with it. When it reached the peak, the pebble said to the mountain, ‘Please, stop causing landslides! There are many who must live in your shadow, and only wish to live in peace.’

“But the mountain laughed, a terrible sound like the earth cracking. ‘Who are you to tell me what to do? Who are you even to speak with me? Mountains do not heed the word of pebbles. Mountains crush pebbles into dust.’ And the mountain did just that, crushing the pebble so that not even its dust remained. That’s it,” Konan said miserably. “They’re mountains, we’re pebbles. They don’t have to listen to us, and they won’t.”

“Then we’ll be mountains, too!” Nagato fired back, with more heat in his voice than Jiraiya had ever heard there. There came the thump of feet on the floorboards. “We’ll make them listen to us!”

“Yeah!” Yahiko sounded. “One day, we’ll change things. No one will ever step on us again, or on anyone else.”

“I hope so,” Konan sighed. “It would be nice to live in a world without war.”

Jiraiya turned and looked at the door, brow furrowed. _Yeah, it would_.

When he looked back to the hills, the rain started to come down even harder, in silver sheets over the side of the roof so thick that Jiraiya could no longer see the sky.

-0-0-0-

On the silver-gray, misty morning of February 20, Jiraiya, Yahiko, Konan and Nagato got up just before dawn. They set out for town down the silent road cloaked with mist, the hills, the distant mountains, the sky and the clouds shrouded with that gray cloak.

Digging up all the ingredients took about two hours—longer than it might have taken had they split up, but since the incident with the two bandits, Jiraiya wasn’t particularly keen on letting the kids go anywhere by themselves. Jiraiya was admittedly a bit surprised when they were actually able to find everything that they were looking for; he was half-expecting for there to have been a run on khoya and for it all to be gone, or something like that. The rain courteously refrained from beginning until after they had gotten back to the shack, which was even more unusual. Maybe someone upstairs was smiling on them today, or Konan’s mother had pulled some strings from the other side to ensure her daughter’s birthday wouldn’t be completely miserable. Whatever the explanation was, Jiraiya would take it.

Cooking had been… interesting. The mutton went in the oven right away, soaking in onion broth, so that was simple enough. Jiraiya had handled the gulab jamun; there was no way in hell he was letting any of those kids handle a frying pan with that much boiling oil in it. After the gulab jamun was done and set to soak in the saffron syrup they’d gotten from a store, they started on the rice.

Making kabuli pulao—at least by the recipe Saira had given him—included working with a lot of spices that Jiraiya _had_ heard of, but had never used in cooking before: cumin, cloves, mint and fennel. They produced a wonderful odor, but apart from the mint, Jiraiya had very little idea of what they would taste like. Nagato, Yahiko and Konan knew what they tasted like, and they all had extremely different opinions about how much was too little and how much was too much, which they proceeded to express extremely _loudly_. The people in town could probably hear the ruckus, all four miles away, but so long as they didn’t come running, Jiraiya didn’t mind. He watched the proceedings with a smirk on his face. He hadn’t realized he’d taken in a trio of food critics.

In the debate concerning spices, Konan eventually prevailed, though whether this was due to her arguments being the most reasonable, kabuli pulao being the dish _she_ had asked for, or her shouting the loudest, Jiraiya couldn’t tell. Konan watched the rice on the stove while Jiraiya watched the mutton in the oven and Yahiko and Nagato set themselves to chopping walnuts and vesting dried figs of their stems. When the rice and the mutton were done, the walnuts, dried figs and raisins were thrown into a frying pan on the stove just long enough to get warm, before being added in with the rest.

Jiraiya watched with amused fondness as all three of his students dug into their meal as though they hadn’t eaten in days. Was that how he’d responded to having his favorite food put before him, at their age? He liked to think he’d acted with a bit more dignity than this. _Then again,_ Jiraiya thought, his smile fading from his face _, I never had to go years without my favorite food. I guess I should cut them some slack, this time._

The gulab jamun was good; it was reminiscent of many fried desserts Jiraiya had had back in Konoha, the kind he’d eat with ice cream at festivals. The kabuli pulao was… interesting. It didn’t taste bad, certainly, but the rice was more heavily seasoned than he was used to. Even the restaurants and food stands back in Konoha that claimed their products were ‘exotic foods from distant locales’ didn’t feature tastes too different from what Jiraiya experienced in a traditional restaurant. Maybe Jiraiya hadn’t been eating at the right places.

Asides from the surprise provided by the rice (which, again, was not bad), the kabuli pulao was quite good as well. They’d gotten a good cut of mutton at the butcher’s shop, and after spending a few hours soaking in the broth it had gotten quite tender, and had picked up the taste of the broth nicely. Jiraiya also found that he liked the taste of the figs and raisins in with the rest a lot more than he’d thought he would.

“It feels like it’s been forever since I had this,” Konan mumbled. She was on to her third helping now, and raked her fork across her rice. “I almost feel like…” But she never finished her sentence, and instead stared almost wistfully down at her place. (Jiraiya had a feeling he knew what she meant, anyways.)

As the big plates gradually drew closer to being completely emptied out, Jiraiya turned to Nagato who was sitting at his left side, and asked jocularly, “So, kid, what do _you_ want for your birthday?”

Nagato gave a small smile. “I like anything with fish,” he said quietly, “just so long as I don’t have to eat it alone.”

“I think I can do that.”

Yeah, he could do that, at least.


End file.
